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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Journey North Time!

February 1st is when the next Journey North Mystery Class will start! Journey North is a series of seasonal projects by Annenberg Media. Most are related to migrations, and one is for gardening. Mystery Class is science, math, and geography all rolled into one!

Every Monday you look up the sunrise and sunset times for where you live and record the photoperiod (amount of daylight.) On Fridays you go to the website to look up the sunrise and sunset data for the mystery locations of 10 different cities around the world. Your objective is to find the longitude, latitude, city, and country of the 10 locations based on this data. What's really neat is graphing the data before and after the spring equinox.

This year I'll be doing this project as a class with the 5 kids ages 8 to 11 in our small homeschool co-op, and I'm really excited about it. The organizers asked for permission to use my blog graph image from last year, so I'll have to see if they actually were able to used it.

I love reading your excitement about Mystery Class. Have you checked out the Countdown to Mystery Class updates on Journey North? It's a new feature this year and I would love to hear your thoughts about the new activities and ideas. I'll be checking out your blog to see how your adventure goes this year. Let the Mystery begin...

I know you'll have fun again this year. We did this last year and really enjoyed it. I'm debating about whether or not to do it this year. Just have to see if we can squeeze it in! It was lots of fun, though! And, we learned a lot.

Visitors

On Science, Learning, and Faith

"Books dealing with science as with history, say, should be of a literary character, and we should probably be more scientific as a people if we scrapped all the text-books which swell publishers' lists and nearly all the chalk expended so freely on our blackboards."Charlotte MasonA Philosophy of Education

"Some teachers may give a live lesson from a stuffed specimen, and other teachers may stuff their pupils with facts about a live specimen; of the two, the former is preferable."Anna Botsford ComstockHandbook of Nature Study

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”

Pope John Paul II

"Beautiful is what we see.More beautiful is what we understand.Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend."Bl. Nicolas StenoFounder of modern geology

"Go my Sons, burn your books and buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth...Observe and experiment without ceasing, for in this way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the true nature of things." Petrus Severinus16th century Danish alchemist

"All this propaganda for literacy of one sort or another comes from people who believe that everyone should share their particular views of what the most important knowledge is and what conclusions should be drawn from it; in other words, they want others to be indoctrinated."Henry H. BauerScientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method

"Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, the Church never supported the idea that the earth is flat, never banned human dissection, never banned the zero, and certainly never burnt anyone at the stake for scientific ideas."James HannamThe Genesis of Science